Top 5, Dead Or Alive: Athlete Horndogs

Welcome to our fourth installment of Top 5 Dead Or Alive. In case you missed our piece last Friday on crazy crowd traditions, we want you to know that this feature is designed specifically to make life hell for our employees. Each week, we’ll ask one of our writers to come up with a definitive list of the five best people, places or things in a particularly subjective category — then, we’ll ask you to tell him who or what is missing from the list. Feel free to be a total dick.

Today, we’ve asked our intern Matt Rudnitsky to name the five biggest athlete horndogs of all time. Tell him what he missed in the comments, email him, or tweet at him.

This one was tough. I mean, really? Athlete horn dogs? We’re talking about guys who are typically in good shape, are notorious partiers, are wealthy, and who are around attractive women pretty much all the time. They’re horn dogs by default.

So how do you make a Top 5 Dead or Alive with a premise like this? Well, the key is to separate your average, minor-league, “I’m just cleaning up because I’m in a uniform” horndog from the real cream of the crop. The legends.

Still, there’s a lot of famous athletes who have gotten around. So, I had to think outside the box to narrow things down a bit. For instance: Wilt Chamberlain seemed like an obvious inclusion. At first. But, you know what? I’m skeptical of his bravado. I mean, he really said this:

“”Yes, that’s correct, twenty thousand different ladies,” he wrote. “At my age, that equals out to having sex with 1.2 women a day, every day since I was fifteen years old.”

Yeah right, Wilt. Your stilt may have been all over the place, but nobody has that much time, especially not a professional athlete. You can’t have sex with women during games, flights, practices or meetings, no matter how charming you may be. That means you were spending every weekend sleeping with at least 23 different girls so the math worked out. I don’t believe you. Your numbers are fraudulent. And there’s no way you were getting one per day until at least your 20s; you weren’t even famous then. No 15-year old is bedding a girl a day. I don’t care how good at basketball you are.

“I’m sure plenty who read the numbers will no doubt think my taste is not particularly high or that I am ‘easy,’ ” he wrote. “I am a man of distinctive taste and most of the women I have encountered, the average Joe would have proposed marriage to on the first date.”

CASE CLOSED. You’re either lying about this, or lying about the number. DISQUALIFIED.